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The Path to a Successful Career Starts with Your Degree
Getting an undergraduate degree is an enormous investment of time, effort, and resources. Some graduates find themselves feeling underwhelmed by the job prospects available to them, or unsure how to get their foot in the door in competitive industries. Fortunately, specialized programs abound that can bolster your skill set and make you more attractive to employers. Here are the top 20 programs you should consider if you want to take your career to the next level.
Data Science
Data is king in the 21st century. By learning how to handle, analyze, and visualize big data sets, you’ll make yourself invaluable to employers of all stripes, from tech to healthcare to retail.
Cybersecurity
As businesses collect more sensitive data, the importance of keeping that data secure becomes paramount. Individuals with expertise in cybersecurity are in demand across virtually every industry, and the pay is excellent.
Bioinformatics
The combination of biology and computer science is creating new vistas in genetics, drug development, and disease research. Learning how to apply computational analysis to biological systems could unlock unexpected career paths.
Data Analytics
Like data science, data analytics is all about making sense of large data sets. However, data analytics often focuses more specifically on business process optimization, making relevant to a different set of industries than data science.
User Experience Design
The move towards customer-centric business models has made user experience design a top need for companies trying to stay ahead of the curve. By becoming an expert in UX design, you’ll be able to not only make intuitive, easy-to-use digital products, but evangelize its importance to leadership teams as well.
Predictive Analytics in Finance
By combining advanced technical skills with a deep understanding of finance, professionals trained in predictive analytics can forecast market trends with astonishing accuracy.
Leadership Studies
Whether you’re leading high-performing teams at a startup or managing a larger team at a larger corporation, leadership skills are essential. Thriving in a leadership role demands an ability to communicate effectively, make nuanced decisions while leading with emotional intelligence, and move projects forward that align with overall company goals.
Environmental Studies
Awareness of our planet’s well-being is leading consumers and investors to apply more pressure on businesses to go green. With a degree in environmental science, you’ll be able to guide organizations towards lower-impact practices that help them stand out when competing for customers.
Marketing Analytics
As digital advertising has exploded in the last decade, so too has demand for people skilled in analyzing and interpreting the resulting data for a company’s bottom line. This field requires a creative mind and a head for quantitative analysis.
Digital Marketing
Current trends in content consumption and circulation place an unprecedented importance on mastering digital marketing tactics–SEO, website design, and driving traffic to digital campaigns. Through a comprehensive digital marketing program, you can learn to thrive in the tools of the trade.
Supply Chain Management
It’s easy to take supply chain management for granted, but in truth an effective one can mean the difference between a successful business and a failure. Through courses of study in Lean Operations and Strategy & Logistics fundamentals, savvy supply chain managers can significantly reduce costs and dramatically improve a company’s bottom line.
Project Management
Every project is unique, but intuition and an effective team play a central role in efficient project management. In honing your project management expertise, you focus on tactics for balancing project timelines, keeping teams on task, and preparing for worst-case scenarios.
Applied Statistics
Did you notice that this list includes several variations of the same broad theme, namely the strategic use of quantitative data? Going even further down that path, statisticians, specifically, are trained to help extract insights from said data, understand it in context, and use it to make better decisions overall.
Business Studies
With a reputation for flexibility of content and versatility upon graduation, a business-related major and minor has held constant as a favorite of many students looking to enter the corporate or finance realms. Some popular drawing points to confer to prospective employers include accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, and economics.
Industrial Design
Combine technical design skills with advanced competence in management and troubleshooting, and you’re on track for a broad specialization in industrial design so you can design usable and attractive physical products, build insight-driven prototypes, and create an effective in-store experience for consumers of your products.
Nursing Informatics
Recent trends throughout the healthcare industry have seen increasing investment across the board in telehealth infrastructure including all aspects mechanical, data-driven accountability, patient charting platforms and distant research medical expenses, while resulting in exponential need of nursing IT specialists equipped for everyday demands of escalating patient needs.
Civil Engineering
Infrastructure operations will likely always warrant our attention—including design, construction, and maintenance of traffic bridges, rail-line transportation or metropolitan systems that deliver water to our taps. As we are currently anticipating numerous extra stressors, civil engineering is bulking up likewise in response.
Legal Studies
While a traditional degree in law is extremely demanding and restrictive for aspiring high schoolers, other undergraduate paths into a legal career such as campaign trails and bachelor programs on paper can teach broader skills to prepare students to work in regulatory, immigration, political advisory pursuits, or other fields that interact in a notable way with the legal barrier to entry.
Game Design
As a classic hands-on example, game design blends psychology, computer programming, history, and aspirational creativity. Formal programs guide students through multiple concepts including usability basics and power-user techniques for designing highly sophisticated interactive gaming experiences.
Graduate Medical Sciences
Scientific performers can easily work in majors related more to research pursuing on-the-ground concerns within methodology than in any traditional physical therapy or caregiving capacity. Programs enabling students would cover ethical standards and mass communication skills and could elaborate and bring together scattered systems of commonly infeasible information into streamlined, life-altering resource repositories.
Taking Your Career to New Heights
Even after earning a degree, not everybody feels set on a career path. One of the fantastic benefits of specialized post-degree programs is the opportunity to pivot careers toward industries that tap into the individual proclivity of particular program entrants, valuable on behalf of introducing self-reflection and creativity towards opportunities invisible before taking the niche curricular approaches of some of these options. Embark on your journey; select the coursework that reflects your interests and professional goals as pairs.
As few others have realized, several specific industry areas hold an enormous tie between enduring strategic decision-making and better informed, tech-fueled rendering the ideal postsecondary candidate smarter, more creative, and firmly geared towards fostering successful companies willing and able to tackle problems that crop up along the way.
